LOS ANGELES — The history of ASCO, the influential Chicano art group that formed in East Los Angeles in 1972, has been characterized by a mixture of fact and fiction, some conjured up by the group itself as part of its enigmatic mythos. Recently, a strange episode of a long-lost artwork recovered after almost four decades has added another chapter of intrigue to its evolving legacy.
In 1987, artist Willie Herrón sold his home and studio located on the El Sereno-Alhambra border of Los Angeles and left for a short tour with his punk band Los Illegals. He asked some friends to help him move since he would be out of town. Upon his return, he realized some of his artwork was missing, most notably the left and right sections of a 36-foot-long multi-panel portable mural titled “Mi Vida y Sueños Locos” (“My Life and Crazy Dreams”) (1973).
Herrón contacted the new owners of the house, who informed him that anything left behind had been disposed of. “‘Oh, your artwork, a lot of it was pretty dilapidated,'” the artist recalls being told. “‘We broke it up and threw it out last week.’” Though dismayed by the destruction of the piece, he still had possession of part of the mural’s central section depicting a skeleton flanked by anguished faces, which he reimagined as a standalone artwork titled simply “Sueños Locos” (“Crazy Dreams”).
For 37 years, he believed that the other panels, along with several other missing artworks, had been destroyed — until he got a text on December 14 last year from Rigo Jimenez, owner of Eastern Projects Gallery, with a photo of a mannequin with a papier-mâché Elvis head that Herrón had created around 1973 for a performance by the Chicano rock band Juicy Lucy.
“Where did you get the Herrón knockoff?” he replied, thinking it might have been a fake given its shabby condition.
“On Stockbridge in El Sereno. The lady said they got the house from you in ’86,” Jimenez replied, along with a photo of a portion of the right side of the destroyed mural.
The two artworks had been included in an estate sale put on by the owners of Herrón’s old house. Jimenez purchased the mannequin for $100 and the mural panels for an undisclosed sum. “I saw his work every day on my way to school and church,” Jimenez told Hyperallergic. He grew up on Snow Drive, two blocks from “The Wall That Cracked Open” (1972), one of Herrón’s best-known murals, painted at the site where his younger brother was stabbed by gang members. “I told the lady, ‘This is important,’” he said.
This is where their stories diverge. According to a Facebook post, Herrón says he considered the artworks stolen and asked Jimenez to return them, a request that was met with silence. Jimenez says he told Herrón about the sale, but the artist never acted to retrieve the works.
“He painted it, but it’s not his property,” Jimenez told Hyperallergic. “He abandoned it when he sold the house.” This view was echoed by a woman who answered the phone at the number listed on the estate sale website, but refused to give her name.
“Mr. Herrón knew the things were at the house, but chose not to get them,” she said, adding that the mural panel had been bolted to a wall in the garage (a detail Herrón denies). “Anything that was left, from dust to rat droppings, all belonged to the property.”
Jimenez claims that when he informed Herrón that the AltaMed Art Collection, one of the preeminent collections of Chicano and Latino art in Southern California, had expressed interest in the mural, the artist was excited at first, telling him about the other panels in his possession.
Susana Smith Bautista, the collection’s associate vice president and chief curator, told Hyperallergic that she put the acquisition plans on hold given the controversy.
“I want to make it very clear that the AltaMed Art Collection expressed an interest in buying the work BEFORE we heard that it was stolen, and that we will NOT and NEVER buy art that is stolen,” she wrote on Herrón’s Facebook post.
“I commend Rigo [Jimenez] for trying to save this work,” she told Hyperallergic. “At least it’s going into the hands of a reputable dealer. The most important thing is that artwork gets saved, taken care of, and shared. That’s what Rigo was trying to do … Even now with all this contention, my biggest concern is putting this mural together.”
If Herrón had indeed been open to the prospect of AltaMed acquiring the work, there was no sign of that initial excitement in his Facebook post, which essentially accuses Jimenez of possessing stolen art.
“I still love the guy. I respect his work,” Jimenez said. “But what he did on Facebook, he’ll get a cease and desist from our attorney.”
This contentious episode points to something larger than simply claims of ownership, touching upon fundamentally different ideas of how art is viewed, exhibited, and collected. Herrón was a vital participant in the multi-platform artworks of ASCO, which blurred boundaries between performance, film, photography, painting, and sculpture; however, he is perhaps best known as a muralist and a conservator. He has no official gallery representation, and is reluctant to show his works in institutions.
“Willie does not sell his work, and he has no monetary gain from institutions exhibiting his work,” Pete Galindo, an arts advocate and producer who has known both Herrón and Jimenez for decades, told Hyperallergic. (Galindo organized a 2009 solo show of Herrón’s work at his former gallery, Federal Art Project, titled Willie Herrón: Xicano Moratorium to the Ballad of El Lay.) “Larger institutions will exhibit work, but depend on the private art market to compensate artists. Since Willie doesn’t sell his work, and much of it is public, when those institutions present works, he expects compensation. His argument has always been: If curators, writers, and administrators are paid, why is he not paid as an artist?”
“Rigo was amenable to sharing the proceeds, but Willie is not interested in the proceeds,” Galindo continued. “It’s not a question of legality, but of ethics. It’s wrong to sell an artist’s work, whoever they might be, without their permission.”
It’s worth noting that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s revelatory 2011 exhibition Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972–1987, part of the Pacific Standard Time initiative, included only three works attributed solely to Herrón. As part of the exhibition, however, the Getty Institute commissioned Herrón to paint a mural based on Harry Gamboa’s photo of ASCO’s iconic “Walking Mural” performance in the same alley where he painted “The Wall The Cracked Open” 40 years earlier.
The curators of that show, Rita Gonzalez and C. Ondine Chavoya, were aware of “Sueños Locos,” the portion of the mural in Herrón’s possession, and had contemplated including it in the exhibition, but it needed conservation that could not be completed by the time the show opened, according to Gonzalez.
“One of my big personal regrets is that we weren’t able to feature it in the exhibition,” Chavoya told Hyperallergic. “When we saw that piece, it struck us not only as unique but as incredibly salient and significant, a testament to the ways that Willie and the groups of artists he was connected to were experimenting with media. Visually it’s just incredible, fusing the aesthetics he was working on with [the Chicano journal] Regeneración and the visual language and traditions of muralism … Mesoamerica meets psychedelia. It’s a tour de force.”
For now, that tour de force lives on only through archival images; the lost sections, including the left side featuring a collaboration with fellow ASCO artist Gronk; and the two extant portions. Herrón tried filing a police report, but says he was told that since the events in question happened so long ago, they would be hard to prove. He is still hopeful that the surviving pieces can be reunited, putting together another piece of the ASCO puzzle.
“I expect like any other work of art that gets stolen for it to be retrieved,” Herrón said. “The works are not for sale. I want it to be part of the original artwork. It’s more important to save for my archives, for my children. It’s more valuable.”
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